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Over the last few weeks, our 2014 Gift Guide has detailed a number of comic book related ideas that you should consider wrapping up for that special pop-culture comic book fan in your life. You can check out two of those lists here and here.

Now, those selections are a little on the pricier side of things, but there are a number of fantastic – and affordable – comic book related compilations that you could lovingly give this holiday season.

Follow me after the jump, and I’ll run through eight different titles, in multiple collections, that everyone needs to reading!

We’re into day two of Biff Bam Pop’s Holiday Gift Guide and we thought it was about time to get you exercising this season, building your muscle mass and working your cardio.

No, not with weights or elliptical machines.

We thought we’d make a select list some of this year’s fantastic – and weighty – tomes of comic book collections. They’re heavy (hence the muscle building) but they’re also page turners that will undoubtedly have you burning calories.

Follow me after the jump for some books that will make great gifts this holiday season!

This whole Marvel NOW! initiative (Marvel Comics’ sort of re-boot and re-fresh answer to DC’s New 52 of a few years ago) has had some interesting results. Issues of Uncanny Avengers, Daredevil and Electra have been provocative. As has the design of the covers which aim to have each Marvel NOW! comic visually jump off the store shelves.

One of the more interesting launches has been Moon Knight, which, six-months later, wraps up its story.

I suppose it no longer needs to be said. Sci-fi storytelling in everyone’s favourite art form is no longer resurgent. Nope. It’s now firmly entrenched. And you can thank publisher Image Comics for that sea change.

Over the last few years, while the big two focused on revamping their lines of superhero comics featuring the words “New” and “Now”, Image busily got to work, publishing great science fiction comics by fantastic creators. Follow me after the break and I’ll plant the seed on their latest offering that is Trees #1.

Of late, there’s been a plethora of genre comics, specifically sci-fi comics, being published in everyone’s favourite pop culture industry. We’ve highlighted many of them here in this column including Saga, Federal Bureau of Physics (once called Collider), Trillium, and Black Scienceamong others.

But it’s not like sci-fi and spec fiction just hit mainstream comics yesterday. No, they been around for along, long time. And today, you get to revisit one of the best of the genre in the perfect format to read the entirety of the series.

You know, there are those weeks where you’ve forgotten to pick up some new, hot comic book on your weekly Wednesday run. It happens once in a while.

Sometimes you forget to buy an item, sometimes the shop forgets to stock the shelves with a particular item, sometimes they even forget to order it entirely and you’re left running to another local shop to pick it up.

This past Wednesday, it was the former.

This past Wednesday, the long-awaited Avengers: Endless Wartime was released. And if you didn’t pick it up, well, today will have to do!

After making the game-changer move of ending all of their monthly series in August 2011 and, calling it the “New 52”, re-starting them with brand new first issues, DC Comics continues to evolve. This year, the publishing company has definitely been shining a light on the darker corners of its universe. The mature, sophisticated publishing arm of Vertigo Comics is still undergoing changes as well, with flagship title Hellblazerrecently ending it 300-issue run. The main protagonist of that series, the beloved chain-smoking English occultist, John Constantine, has been folded up into the DC universe proper, continuing his supernatural adventures in a new ongoing monthly series called, appropriately enough, Constantine.

Ray Fawkes has worked for both DC Comics and Vertigo Comics along with a host of other publishers including Oni Press, Image Comics, Top Shelf Comics and Marvel Comics. The Eisner, Harvey and Shuster Award nominee is now writing some of his most high-profile work to date at DC Comics, namely Justice League Dark and Constantine as well as having a hand in DC’s upcoming Trinity War summer blockbuster storyline.

JP Fallavollita met with the Toronto-based writer and artist at the 2013 edition of the Toronto Comics Arts Festival (TCAF) and had a chance to speak with him over the phone about his recent writing responsibilities. In the first part of this interview, Fawkes talks about his experiences with fan-favourite character, John Constantine, the history and responsibility of writing him in both a solo series and a group series, and his story plans for the near future.

In the decades since “Flash of Two Worlds” in Flash #123 in 1961, the story that introduced Earth-Two and the basic concept of the Multiverse in comics, the idea of parallel universes have gone from science fiction theory to science fact. The Multiverse is more relevant now than it ever has.

While DC Comics has been the place the Multiverse is most bandied about, Marvel has done its share of play there as well. Marvel’s past in parallel dimensions seems about to come back and bite it in its butt in recent issues of Avengers and New Avengers. It’s a coming crisis in the Marvel Multiverse, after the jump.

I’m not a big fan of cartoons produced in the Japanese-styled Anime or Manga aesthetic. I know there are a lot out there that are. Some of those fans write for this very website. Still, growing up, I was a huge fan of Star Blazers and Robotech. Silver Hawks was a pretty cool show and Akira was amazing. These programs, and a few others, were able to make the jump across the Pacific and reach North America households to much acclaim. More importantly, they fuelled the imagination of kids and got them interested in Anime and Manga. Maybe that’s why I like the DC Entertainment-produced, Anime-styled, Batman: Gotham Knight, released in 2008, so much. We got to see a favourite character from a radically different perspective.

Not to be outdone, Marvel Entertainment took that same idea and expanded upon it, creating four separate, 12-episode series’, based on their most popular comic book characters.

When you think super-teams in the Marvel Comics universe, the Avengers come to mind immediately, followed quickly by the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and half a dozen others. I’m going to delve a little deeper, and take a journey into the forgotten corners of the Marvel Universe. Here’s a look at some of the forgotten teams of the Marvel Universe.